When ice hockey’s greatest prize, the storied Stanley Cup, visits Oak Bay in March this year, local sports fans will celebrate its homecoming, a century in the making, recalling when our capital city played a starring role in Canada's professional ice hockey development. On March 30, 1925, the Victoria Cougars triumphed over the defending champion Montreal Canadiens, to win Lord Stanley’s glittering silver bowl—hockey’s holy grail—in front of thousands of boisterous fans in the Patrick Arena on Cadboro Bay Road, right here in Oak Bay.
For those in the know, Oak Bay is not a mere footnote in hockey history, but offers a fulsome and exciting chapter of innovation and triumph during the sport’s formative years. Several exciting hockey ‘firsts’ happened here, including the introduction of the forward pass and the blueline. Oak Bay was once home to the world’s first purpose-built indoor artificial ice hockey rink and hosted the first professional hockey game played on artificial ice in Canada.
That story begins with two famous brothers, Lester and Frank Patrick, both skilled hockey players, innovators and ambitious businessmen, who along with their father Joseph, founded the Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA) in 1911. To support their new league, the Patrick family built the 4,200-seat Patrick Arena at the corner of Cadboro Bay Road and Epworth Street (across from today’s Oak Bay High School) and the 10,500-seat Denman Arena on West Georgia Street in Vancouver—both constructed within a year of announcing their plans for the new league. The arena cost over $100,000, opened to great fanfare on Christmas Day 1911, and hosted the first game of the new PCHA on January 2, 1912, between the Victoria and New Westminster teams. A newspaper called it a spectacle featuring “the fastest men and the fastest game on earth.”
With the PCHA as their experimental laboratory, the Patrick brothers brought many innovations to ice hockey, including numbering players’ jerseys, awarding assists, substituting players ‘on the fly,’ as well as introducing a farm system and pioneering a post-season playoff format. They also invented the penalty shot, first scored by Victoria player Tommy Dunderdale during an away game against the Vancouver Millionaires at the Denman Arena in 1921.
Victoria’s PCHA team, now famously remembered under the Cougars’ moniker, was known by various names over the years, both official and unofficial, including the “Senators,” “Aristocrats” and “Capitals.”
The PCHA operated from 1911 to 1924, until merging with the Western Canada Hockey League. Under this league’s banner, the Victoria Cougars competed for and won the Stanley Cup, already then well established as ice hockey’s most prestigious prize.
Originally costing ten pounds sterling, and crafted by a British silversmith, the Stanley Cup is the oldest trophy in North American professional sports. Steeped in myths and legends intertwined with those of Canada itself, it was commissioned in 1892 by Lord Stanley of Preston, then serving as Governor General of the Dominion of Canada. He gifted it as an annual prize awarded to Canada's top amateur ice hockey team. Professional hockey teams became eligible to win it in 1906. From 1915 to 1926, the champion teams of the two main professional hockey leagues at the time, the National Hockey Association/National Hockey League and the Pacific Coast Hockey Association/Western Canada Hockey League competed with each other for Cup glory.
During the 1924-25 Western Canada Hockey League season, the Victoria Cougars finished third out of six teams in 28 regular-season games, behind the Calgary Tigers and the Saskatoon Sheiks. In the first two playoff rounds, the Cougars beat both Saskatoon and Calgary to advance, as WCHL league champions, to the Stanley Cup final against the defending champions Montreal Canadiens from the NHL.
The Cup final that year was a best-of-five format, and the Cougars had ‘home ice advantage’ as all games were played on the West Coast. Three of the four games were held in Oak Bay’s arena, with one played in front of an overcapacity crowd of 11,000 at the Denman Arena in Vancouver.
The Cougars won the first two games, 5-2 and 3-1, respectively, before the Canadiens mounted a comeback, notching a win in the third game 4-2. The fifth and final game was played to a sold-out crowd in Oak Bay, who cheered on the Cougars to a thrilling and decisive 6-1 victory, winning the series and the Stanley Cup three games to one. The Daily Colonist proudly proclaimed: “Cougars Win Stanley Cup. Victoria’s Own Are World Hockey Champions.”
The Victoria Cougars were both the last non-NHL team and most recent British Columbia team to win the Stanley Cup. They made it to the Cup final again in 1926 but failed to repeat as champions, losing to the Montreal Maroons at the newly built Forum in Montreal. Shortly afterwards, the team was sold and moved to the U.S., initially becoming the Detroit Cougars, then the Falcons and finally the Detroit Red Wings, one of the NHL’s famous “Original Six” franchises, in 1932.
The Patrick Arena burnt to the ground on Remembrance Day 1929 in a fire that was likely deliberately set. Except for a commemorative banner honouring the 1924-25 Victoria Cougars which proudly hangs from the rafters of the Memorial Centre downtown, for decades little trace of Oak Bay’s starring role in hockey history remained until 2001, when a monument was installed on the grounds of Oak Bay High School engraved with an image of the Stanley Cup and a description of our community’s pioneering role.
The 1925 Victoria Cougars have been inducted into the Greater Victoria and B.C. Sports Halls of Fame. Of all the memorable moments in Vancouver Island sporting history, their Stanley Cup victory over the Montreal Canadiens remains the greatest. Even today, Oak Bay residents who live by the former arena site occasionally dig up an old beaten-up hockey puck or two while tending to their garden—and in doing so discover a keepsake of an errant ‘slapshot from the past,’ from a bygone era when Oak Bay was ‘centre ice’ of the hockey universe, and the 1925 Stanley Cup winning Cougars its greatest champions.
The Victoria Hockey Legacy Society is planning a “Century Celebration” in honour of the 1925 Victoria Cougars, from March 29 – 30. For info, visit: vhls.ca. Other events are being planned across the region for March 28-30.
This article is from the spring edition of Tweed.
